Category: Text Effects

3d text in Photoshop can be tough, especially making a really nice looking composition. I have looked around the web and I have seen a lot of 3D text that is 3D, but it doesn’t quite blow you away. Below you will see 10 different ways to make 3d text that are stunning.

Click on each title to view the tutorial on how to make that effect. You can click on the images themselves to see a larger version of the image.

Make Steel Looking text. Also learn how to make the brushed steel texture. Once you know this you can add your own modifications and create your own steel look. There are millions of ways of making the steel text look. This is one way.

Level: Intermediate

Photoshop Version: CS2 (Can be done in Earlier versions up to Photoshop 7.0)

Definitions:

DPI: Dots Per Inch. This means how many pixels there are per inch of space.

Tutorial:

First create a new image with a black background. Create it 5 Inches Wide by 1 1/2 Inches tall at 300 dpi, or a dpi you desire.

Next, with your choice of font, create a white text saying whatever you would like to put there. I used Steel as the text and Franklin Gothic as the font. Some other good fonts for this are Bank Gothic and Copperplate Gothic.

Press “Ctrl j” while selected on the text layer. This will make a copy of the layer.

Next click on the rasterized type layer and click the lock transparent pixels button. This will loc the transparent pixels, so that anything you do to this layer wont affect the already transparent pixels.

Next thing you do is go to [Filer -> Noise -> Add Noise]

Apply the settings as seen here. If you want more streaks up the amount. If you want mutli-color streaks unclick “Monochromatic” which means one color only.

Next, go to [Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur]

Apply the settings here, or change them as you desire. The main one you might want to adjust is distance. This is how much it applies the motion blur.

Now Select the gradient tool. Go to the gradient editor and select the “foreground to transparent” gradient. Click ok. Make sure your foreground is black. Then drag you gradient from bottom-right up to the top-left and top-left to the bottom-right. Here you can see what we are going for:

Next double click on the rasterized text layer to open the layer styles window. Check the box named satin and set the settings shown here or a variation if you like.